Show Explores State As Writers' Mecca

Show Explores Writers' State

October 21, 1991|By JON LENDER ; Courant Staff Writer

Connecticut notes proudly that many famous writers have lived here. But when you think about it, you may say ... so what? Connecticut has a lot of colleges with faculty positions for writers, so it's just kind of natural. Also, it is close to New York, where the publishers are, and writers often want to be near their publishers.

TV preview That's similar to the reason broadcast personalities Don Imus and David Letterman live down in Fairfield County.

What, then, is the deeper reason -- the greater significance -- as to why this state has been home to Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thornton Wilder, Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Robert Ludlum and William Styron, among others? CPTV takes a stab at that question with a half-hour documentary, "On Common Ground: Connecticut Writers," Thursday at 10 p.m.

And there are other questions: What did living in Connecticut have to do with what the authors wrote? Did they draw inspiration from Connecticut -- or was it merely a comfortable, quiet place in which to reflect on experience gained elsewhere? The answers are not absolutely clear. But there are musings by several university professors and prominent authors, amid film footage of Connecticut and old photographs.

The program traces Connecticut's literary tradition back about two centuries to a group of Yale graduates known collectively as "the Hartford Wits." The Wits, like some of their Ivy League counterparts today, railed against the political radicals of the time, who then included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

There is prominent mention of Connecticut's serious-minded, Yankee tradition and the well-settled, domesticated land.

"I never was in a city where huckleberries and morality bloomed so profusely," Twain (whose publisher, a publisher of Bibles, was actually in Hartford, not in New York) is quoted as having written to a friend.

It is noted that with few exceptions (O'Neill, for a major example), the Land of Steady Habits has not been the literary setting for great writing -- unlike this country's great cities, or the South or the West, says Yale University Professor Don Faulkner.

The CPTV program suggests that a lot of writers fill up on life somewhere else, and then, when they are older, they adopt Connecticut as home and pour their lives out in literature.

Connecticut provides serenity and comfort, and maybe a sort of neutral standard (or a "generic landscape") against which to measure prior experience.

Faulkner tells how Stevens, the Hartford insurance executive who wrote some of American literature's most challenging poetry, would walk to work, lost in thought and oblivious to his surroundings. Stevens sometimes would retrace his steps along the same block -- all the while trying to work out the rhythm of what he was writing.

Faulkner called the Stevens example an "emblem for how a lot of writers react to Connecticut. ... The place becomes, itself, if not a springboard perhaps a touchstone for ideas that ultimately have not that much to do with living here." "What Wallace Stevens sought in Connecticut was not inspiration but occupation," the narrator says. "What Connecticut has offered writers is convenience, commerce and an informed and civilized populace living in a tamed countryside." "The basic thrust of my books [has] come from other environments," says "Sophie's Choice" author Styron, who has lived in the quiet Litchfield County hills of Roxbury for decades but was raised in the South. "Writing has many wellsprings. It comes from all sorts of sources other than one's environment." "For me," Styron says, "I enjoy living in Connecticut but don't brood on it as a place which is going to provide me necessarily with material for my work." So, many authors write in Connecticut while thinking about somewhere else, right? Don't feel bad, Faulkner says. He sees no need for the state's people or its culture "to feel inferior about providing what has become really a fruitful ground, almost like a catalytic ground for many writers who come from other parts of the country to find their true, mature voices while living in Connecticut." But Ludlum also talks of the need to encourage young writers from Connecticut to write candidly about their own experiences -- particularly those from the cities.

In the end, the documentary concludes that "for most [writers], something deeper holds them" in Connecticut, besides work in academia or proximity to the publishing business.

Connecticut is, the narrator says loftily, "a malleable landscape upon which memories may be pressed. And in the end, the boundaries drawn on maps are arbitrary and capricious while the boundaries of imagination are unlimited. Writers will always remain to roam free, no matter where they live, exploring the borderless realms of memory. ... "